Diagnostic laboratories have long used archaic, manual, and cumbersome techniques that often lead to poorly reproducible and inaccurate results. Even today, most molecular and cell-based diagnostic systems use outdated and non-integrated technologies unable to cost-effectively perform massively parallel-scale analyses. System capabilities are further stressed by the genomics revolution that has accelerated demand for potential markers for use in target validation in drug discovery and development. Consequently, additional automation and parallelism are sought to enable efficient specimen handling, processing and analysis.
With the emphasis on lowering costs throughout the health-care industry, efforts are continuously being made to reduce the amount of labor involved, and the associated cost. The primary cost component of preparing and staining a specimen on a slide is labor. Accordingly, many efforts have been devoted to reduce the labor cost component of preparing a slide.
Microscope slide covers are typically thin, fragile, and have relatively accurately plane polished surfaces so that when stacked together they tend to adhere to one another and are difficult to separate. Separation can only reliably be accomplished by sliding one over its immediate neighbor, but this in practice is not easy to accomplish because groups of the slips tend to slide as packs from an end of a stack of such slips and the extraction of a single slip from such a pack requires care and dexterity. Where large numbers of covers have to be routinely applied to microscope slides, this operation can represent a significant proportion of the total workload of the technicians.